


Shades of Grey

by nimodes



Category: Multi-Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-02-18 16:27:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18703240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimodes/pseuds/nimodes
Summary: Set in the Xanadu universe. A followup.





	1. Chapter 1

Shades of Gray

While i was looking for something else, i ran across Shifti-dot-org and the Xanadu stories. At least some of which i was familiar with due to Ed Becerra and his story "Liquid Courage" where an avatar of myself appeared. After re-reading that i got to "The Prince Of All Saiyan" where i appeared again as a recurrent character. A couple of points in both stories had me scratching my head at my avatar's actions, and so this.

So credit where credit is due. Xanadu is from Bryan Derksen.

***

Once upon a time, Kublai Con was a science fiction convention. Kubla Con is unrelated and on another coast. Kublai Con was bigger and went across genre/type categories. Kublai Con attracted Star Wars fans, anime fans, Star Trek fans, Bablyon 5 afficionados, gamers of various types and subgroups, Collectible Card Game enthusiasts, Renaissance Faire types who were into one fantasy series or another, those who enjoyed military SF, and those who dabbled with fare such as Harry Potter or even the supernatural romance novel reader.

There were groups that, even in the inclusiveness of the SF crowd - tended to stick to themselves and get a bit of avoidance from the rest. At least until the Event. Things got mixed up a bit after that.

Xanadu was the name of the hotels it was stretched across. Because of the Kublai Con, no matter what hotels were involved - it all became lumped under the fan-name of Xanadu due to that old poem. It was an in-joke, and SF fans LOVE in-jokes.

If you were there, you know what happened at Xanadu. If you were not there, you probably have heard one of way too many conspiracy theories or stories about the whole thing. Denials of the whole thing happening, sometimes spoiled by one of those affected attending the meeting and proving that special effects can only go so far.

Kublai Con was something that wasn't on my planner. It was in Florida that year after all, and at that point my home was in Arizona. Where the seasons come in reasonable for 3/4 of the year and then unbearably hot for the last part. When one's budget is as often tight as mine was, one did not normally include trips across the country or hotel rooms.

Nonetheless, this one managed to somehow overcome my natural stinginess and I had arranged to share a room with three others to cut down on the expenses. Two cosplayers and a gamer in fact, not that any of us were particularly devoted to that hobby. I had a "Son Goku" costume from when I had done an "Anime Expo" convention in Los Angeles, so I stashed that one and one of my Original Character type costumes - Grayl Grayfang, urban wizard of a magitek setting. Meh. Not that I thought my level of costume-making would do anything more than maybe break the ice in conversation.

Everyone who was at the Con, even those few who weren't in any sort of costume that night, remembers the Event. A wave of dizziness, feelings of disorientation. Some got blinding headaches that were over a moment later.

It was like being pulled in more than four directions at the same time for me. I ended up focusing on the strongest of the four as things went down. I felt massive pain, followed by feeling better than I'd ever felt in my life.

I was...

I was Son Goku, martial artist who'd been raised by Son Gohan (the old man one, not the son I had named after my teacher). I was Saiyan (or was it Saiyajin?) and had a wife named Chi-Chi and two sons. My favorite hobby was getting into fights with really strong people.

I was Grey-el, a silver dragon priest who specialized in divination and healing magic. I spent most of my time in human form, the better to interact with the fascinating short-lived races around me.

I was Grayl Grayfang, an urban wizard specializing in runecraft who wouldn't have been terribly out of place in a Harry Potter or Harry Dresden universe.

I was Grief, a deceased human working in the Divine Intervention Office of a multi-planar rescue/assistance agency.

I was Susumu Kodai, the SCA-based L'etoile De Lune kenjutsu student/wandering swordsman.

I was...

Not only was I having trouble with sorting out memories, there was the input from extra senses. I'd lost my sense of smell due to some pretty horrible sinus infections that hit when I moved to Arizona. I was suddenly hit by a barrage of scents clamoring for attention. That was NOTHING compared to the chi sense though. I'd never been able to detect or sense any such thing before, and now here was a whole new sense and it was giving me the rough equivalent of a Red Alert with Multiple Bogeys Inbound.

Eventually I shoved that down too. First, figure out how much trouble I was in - then work out the 'what the hell just happened' part.

[Multiple Magical Signatures. Analyzing Energy Wave.]

"Quiet," I told my Nyoibo staff. Which I'd outfitted with a wristwatch as part of my nod towards my techwizard character. Except it wasn't fake anymore and it wasn't a watch anymore. Instead one end of the staff was fitted with metal hieroglyphs and a crystalline disc.

[Stealth mode.]

There was too much craziness around me, so I did something instinctive - just going on automatic. Two fingers pointed at forehead, and space shifted around me so that I was in the room we'd rented.

Instantaneous Movement. One of Son Goku's advanced chi techniques.

That really started a rush of uncertainty about the whole identity issue. Who was I? If memories were what made us who we are, what shaped our reactions to events and viewpoints, then what did it mean when we remembered being someone else?

I couldn't have been more than a few minutes when the shadows darkened in one corner of the room. I felt his presence a bare moment before that but in my current mental state - it took his physical presence.

An old friend, gaming buddy, and one of those others who'd ended up in this circus. Morgan Wright. Who'd come in the character I'd written him as in one set of stories, as Obsidian - the Silver Millenium Knight. Unlike Endymion, or Tuxedo Mask, from that series who'd embodied Hope - Obsidian had powers over Fear.

I prepared myself as the darkness gathered. If I were confused about MY identity, then what about Morgan? Would this be Morgan, Obsidian, his favorite gaming character (which was a Malkavian vampire from "Vampire:The Masquerade"), or his D&D character - a high level ranger?

"Put that away," said Morgan, looking at the hand holding a golden glow. "We've got real problems."

"What?" I asked, putting the teleport together with Obsidian's abilities. Shadow-port.

"Everyone's become their costumes," said Obsidian/Morgan. "The zombie cosplayers and the vampire LARPers..."

I couldn't help it. It was something very appropriate to the situation but something that Son Goku would absolutely not say. "Oh. Shit."

It was exactly as bad as others have painted it. Taking down a Master-level vampire that is mad with bloodlust and hunger is made a LOT more difficult when you're trying not to hurt anyone. I went in with martial arts. Obsidian drew a sword suitable for his ranger, and we blocked a major corridor.

That lasted until the clerics and mages could arrive and start reinforcing the position. I missed most of the details, as I and Obsidian continued as basically security guards. Except that NORMAL security guards wouldn't do any good right then. Zombies. Something else that I've never quite understood the appeal of.

It turned out the Postponed Zombie Apocalypse took about an hour and a half before we were pulled from perimeter guard duty to deal with supervillains who had a little restraint problem. The only problem one of those was someone who came as Cthulhu. Yeah. Elder horror, except he wasn't all that horrific. Just fast, agile, and having a rubbery body. Someone who had gone as Andromeda Saint Shun wrapped him in chains and the magic chains apparently had the right juju to hold Mini-Cthulhu in place.

Again, it would have been easy for Obsidian to decapitate him or for me to blast him across three time zones. Trying to capture instead of kill is a LOT trickier.

Obsidian and I split up at that point. He was trying to contact the others from our room, I was keeping an eye out for other people going around acting badly.

Which was when I was cornered.

Someone glanced at my badge, and began ranting and raving about my unfair treatment of his favorite character.

I tried pointing out that I didn't dislike Akane Tendo. I just didn't see her as being that great a character. I pointed out that I only started getting nasty about her in stories after the first death threats from the FanFiction Mailing List started coming my way. Computer viruses and other attacks began arriving, which further made me less sympathetic to their cause. Yeah, maybe I should have just put them all on a floppy disc and sent them to the FBI. Not an option I had considered in the early 90s. Had it happened today, yeah, it would have all gone to the FBI and local police. Live and learn.

I'd just finally had enough, as the fanboy railing against someone who looked like Son Goku drew enough attention that we now had a small crowd. It was pointed out later that being able to focus on something relatively normal like that was attractive to people otherwise going into shock over everything else.

I finally blew up. "She's a complete and total maniac. Violent, uncute, flatchested - and the way she treats him-"

It ALWAYS happens like that. Before the Event, before Xanadu. Even if you're not into SF or anime or anything else. Someone will pester and poke and be annoying as all hell, and when you finally have had enough - boom. Someone's got you on camera or tape recording. Then comes the lawyers and all the other various people to talk about what a horrible person you are. OR, someone comes up to you who is a genuine threat.

When VEGITA interrupted, looking as if he desperately wanted to get into a fight, that had a very welcome effect. The crowd around me, and the fanboy who'd cornered me, left. Rapidly. Most likely going to find a bomb shelter and crawl under it.

Son Goku and Vegita get into a fight. The loser of the fight? Whatever happened to be at Ground Zero.

No fight, which was good. I'd managed the one Instant Movement, but hadn't done anything like that since then. Getting into a knockdown/drag-out with another insanely powerful martial artist type was NOT a good thing for the neighborhood and I was quite aware of the police presence that had been slowly trickling in during the past hour.

I didn't drink, Vegita did and does, and I just trusted him to be able to realize when he'd had enough. It didn't seem to have ANY physical effect on him though, he put away a sixpack of some import beer at the hot dog stand and another at the supermarket. Never so much as a slurred word.

That the hot dog place had turkey dogs was more than welcome. I couldn't eat pork or beef, not without major gastrointestinal problems. A side effect from going Vegan in the seventies is that when I decided that it wasn't working was that I stopped being able to digest certain foods during my abstinence. The lactose intolerance was much later.

I dropped the food from the supermarket off in the hotel room and informed them that the police had locked down the place.

Obsidian, Morgan - whatever. Cussed. He had... a history. Not all of it bad, but not all of it good.

That left the other two. Who were people that Morgan had known more than myself, and were currently two elves. One dark elf ninja and one high elf priestess. Both of whom we'd seen briefly during the attempted zombie uprising but been too busy to say hello at the time. They had been doing fine and not been in danger, that'd been all the detail we'd been able to focus on. Better than fine as it turned out. Adriana Of The Light had some serious power over the undead and a few Raise spells that replenished themselves daily. Darana the Silent Blade was another story. Both remembered enough of their past to recognize us, but they were mostly taken over by their characters. That would change over the next few weeks, as they actively tried to remember details and concentrate on who they'd originally been.

Morgan was the first to declare that he was NOT going to leave himself open for scientific experimentation, bureaucrats legislating him into wearing tracking equipment, or any of a dozen other scenarios we discussed. I went off to think about it, met up with Vegi - Rob again, and we tried flying from the roof. It was weird and felt odd, but we did it.

When I got back, there was some luggage missing as well as my three roomies. There was a note, basically saying that they weren't going to wait and see how it was all going down while being under house arrest.

Between his ranger abilities and his talents as Obsidian, I was just hoping that there wasn't a trail of dead bodies as Morgan slipped away. Darana would probably slip away even easier. Adriana might have been a problem, tall blonde elf in priestess costume after all, but I never heard anything until MUCH later.

We had the superhero meeting the next day. Rob mentioned every physical ailment he had was gone. At which point things clicked and I realized my lactose intolerance was probably gone. I decided to investigate.

I used to reward myself down at the Sonic Drive-In every payday with a pineapple (sometimes another flavor) sundae. Then I started having troubles about an hour to three hours after I had one. It got worse. I stopped the habit, the problems stopped. Unless I ate something else with a milk product in it.

Lactose intolerance hits a number of people in their later years. Once again, I hit the crappy end of the odds in life. There were other telling aches and pains missing, but I took the opportunity to get re-acquainted with dairy. Ah, milkshakes. Pizza. How I had missed you.

So we had the superhero meeting, I came back to an empty room.

The only notable thing was that on the way out I noticed a TARDIS, door open and people ducking in. I was incredibly tempted, but passed them by, just wishing them luck. Something had bothered me about that and it took me nearly an hour to remember it.

There had been someone I'd seen the morning before the Change who'd made a TARDIS costume. Was this the same guy, who was now an inanimate (if extremely powerful and somewhat mental) object? The whole Personality Death aspect had been shot around a few places where I'd heard it - and this was a new and disturbing idea. I think more than a few of us had sleep-deprived nights from the implications and the near-miss of that particular bullet.

You've heard Vegita/Rob's story, and you've heard from Tony. We went to Larkspur, then to a little ghost town in Arizona. It's surprisingly easy to find little places like that from the air, and we set up a little refuge while we waited for things to settle.

There were other events, of course. You've heard about the Anarchist Supervillains, some of whom were heroic characters in the source material. That was a tough time for some, just waiting on the sidelines until someone decided the Godzilla Threshold was passed and they could send in the supers.

I met up with several others, as I was getting building supplies in North California at the time. We were having money troubles up in Paradisio (the name of the ghost town we'd taken over and rebuilt) and the idea of being able to operate openly instead of continually staying under the radar was a pretty strong draw.

You've probably read the reports, seen the footage. The Anarchist Supervillain Revolution mainly held to the basic ideas you hear about from groups like that. Every corporation is corrupt, all CEOs were evil, capitalism is inherently immoral - that sort of thing. If they hadn't had superpowers and started throwing cars through bank windows, everyone involved would have just shrugged and gone about their usual day-to-day.

Of course, because they DID have superpowers and because they WERE throwing cars through windows - it got a lot more attention and a lot less sympathy.

We went in without any organization or plan, but in defense of that - none of us knew anyone else other than a vague idea of what our characters could do in our individual series.

Yeah, so it didn't exactly go well. Our werewolf got flattened by a thrown car. Being a werewolf, she got better on the next full moon. As this was during the day and a week away from that full moon - it pretty much took her out of the battle.

I'd only caught a look at the coverage on CNN while at the Home Depot picking up those plumbing supplies. So I knew we were up against some heavies. The Abomination, Captain Boomerang, one of the versions of Superman, and three I didn't recognize but heard someone describe as minor Batman villains.

Captain Boomerang was using some smashed-up vehicles for cover as he was NOT bulletproof and there were police snipers waiting to take him out if he showed himself. The Superman type apparently didn't have X-Ray Vision or wasn't using it for some reason. He still reacted really damn fast. As he was the potentially most powerful and problematic, I went after him. My first attack was a high speed grab intended to get both of us out of town and fighting over the water. Good plan, huh? Too bad he figured out what I was doing and stopped us both cold.

That was one of the more savage beat-downs I've gotten since the change. If it weren't for those sunflower seeds I'd had in old gaming dice bag at the Xanadu Event and thought of as senzu beans - it might have taken me months to get over that fight. Superman, ANY Superman, is not an opponent to take lightly.

So I started off fighting Superman, who was apparently a DCU animated series version. All the sparring sessions with Rob/Vegita came in handy, as without those I wouldn't have been able to go to Super Saiyan. In that fight I went to Super Saiyan II for the first time. I even tried a quick spell and my magical staff - but apparently this Superman had no vulnerability to magic. Even then I was hard pressed to keep up until Piccolo showed up.

Yeah, someone had gone as Piccolo from later in the Z storyline and been at the Event. He wasn't a match for this Superman either, but two-on-one meant that we could at least tag-team the guy. Then the two Ranma (or the Ranma and the Ranko) that I'd been training alongside with Rob showed up and started taking pot shots at him from a distance. Not that Rob showed up, it would later turn out that he was off dealing with some unresolved story from his past prior to Xanadu.

You name the maneuver and we were trying it. Against Superman's reaction time and nigh-invulnerability - it was like chipping away at a mountain. Even when he didn't avoid a Kaio-ken Enhanced Kamehaha - it didn't do nearly enough.

Eventually though - we did wear down the mountain enough. Most of that fight was recorded by reporters who had the sense to film from way far away. Heck, some of it was picked up by satellites.

I later found out that two Klingons had been killed fighting the Abomination and Captain Chameleon died four hours later from taking an exploding boomerang to the face. (Give the guy points for guts at least - considering his powers were hardly up to handling even a Spider-man villain.) However, a police sniper managed to tag Captain Boomerang and pretty much ended that villain's career and keep anyone else from suffering the explosive boomerang fate.

Once the Abomination was down and Evil Superman was out of the picture - the "minor Batman villains" gave up peacefully. They hadn't thrown anything through anything or even been particularly menacing, so they got a lighter sentencing.

At which point I found out that Obsidian was back, and had taken down the Abomination. One of the big guns of the Marvel Universe, stronger and bigger and uglier than the Hulk (at least until the Hulk got a mad on) - taken down by a guy in a black duster and a pair of reflective sunglasses who just talked him down. And probably had trouble sleeping for a month afterward. Obsidian is the Knight of Fear after all.

So we had a bit of a reunion. Made plans that never went anywhere. Parted on relatively good terms.

When I got back to Paradisio with the building supplies, I found the next problem had already arrived. Seems that we were seen as squatters on a historic site. We ended up relocating to Larkspur in Colorado with a bunch of others.

It was either that or begin a war of escalation. Sure we could possibly have won, but how much damage and how many lives would that have taken?

On the way to Larkspur, stopping at a truckstop in Tucson, I got hit with a sniper bullet. In the head. Just for that record, that hurts.

I found the chi signature easily enough, then went with Instant Move and caught the guy before the gun could be taken apart. No identification, but one of our group had some military or police experience (I never asked because some people are pretty sensitive about that sort of thing) and pointed to various parts of equipment and said it was CIA. Which is illegal, as far as I know, within the borders of the United States. Which left FBI or some similar agency.

Which kind of got past the issue of having a large caliber bullet which had just smacked me in the head. Prior to that - I hadn't known I was bulletproof. Son Goku in the series had been hit a few times with bullets and they'd just caused comic relief damage. If it had been aimed at one of the two Saotome twins - they'd likely have died, so I was pretty upset about it.

Vegita was in Vegita Mode and just told me to grow a pair.

You've heard about Larkspur already, so I'll just leave that part blank. Ranma and Ranko pretty much fit in. I was kind of a fifth wheel, and that would probably be giving myself too much credit.

Face it, everything I could do there - not only could someone else do it better - they'd look better doing it. Most of it, there was a lot of people better qualified for any given task.

Which is why, after a year, I left Larkspur. I had an idea of hunting down and joining some other group, maybe construct a Lagrange O'Neill Colony like in the Gundam series.That was my intention at least.

Which brings me to here and now. At the bottom of Lake Michigan.

Apparently I was not completely bullet-proof. At least I think it was a bullet. Could have been something similar I suppose. It certainly looks like a bullet wound.

So here I am, using what is left of my magic to put the story of my life on computers that come close enough for me to reach. Hoping that someone gets word to Larkspur and puts the warning out.

Whoever is hunting down the survivors of Xanadu is out there, and they're getting smarter.


	2. Dead to Alive?

I died. It felt oddly familiar.

I'd been shot by something that was able to penetrate skin that could normally be hit by at least .45 ammunition and produce just a bit of a sting. I'd been flying at the time over one of the Great Lakes in the United States of America and I'd been knocked out of the air. Then I'd been drowning as I sunk, my weighted clothing working against me there. So I'd not only been shot and had a fist-sized hole knocked in me - I'd been drowning as well.

I tried to get a message off using one of the methods available to me, but things had gotten dark very quickly.

I was in a silent darkness that was neither cold nor hot. Physical sensations, even the awareness of one's body, were missing.

Who was I? That was a complicated question, in my case more than usual.

Back a few years there was an event, the Xanadu Event. A science fiction and fantasy convention where a lot of people wore costumes as part of the festivities. At the convention there was an Event (a wizard referred to it as a Class IV Multiversal Breach but that may have been the wizardly version of technobabble) that made the costumes real.

An example came to mind. Philip Corsceu was an accountant who had attended the convention and had been wearing a gorilla costume, with a t-shirt over the costume with a mad scientist logo. After the Event, he was now a gorilla physically but remembered being Philip the accountant. He also estimated his intelligence level had risen by practically thirty points.

It wasn't all that good. There were people whose identities were completely rewritten, becoming the fictional individual they'd chosen to costume as. In some cases it was really bad and they literally lost their minds and become animals in mind as well as body. There were people who'd become monsters in mind and body. The zombies were among the worst, carrying an infection that turned others bitten into flesh-rotting plague carriers with a taste for living flesh the same as they were. Fortunately there were others who had transformative abilities and had been put to work trying to help those afflicted. Unfortunately nobody had a flat-out "Return to Normal" button.

Also unfortunately lots of people with lots of political power or wealth or other means were very interested in getting control of the resource that was superpowered people. Religious power-pushers were all over the place as to whether we were demons or devils or witches or abominations. The Catholic Church went one way and another and finally settled on "people who just had some extra talents and could use them for good works or bad" - which was among the best attitudes. Various criminal cartels were among the worst.

I remembered going to Xanadu as a version of the main character from a series that put the overpowered into a martial arts series. "Dragonball Z" - I'd had the costume from before it made its way to the USA with the appropriate props. It had been a mix of various points in the timeline of the series, and had some things that weren't strictly in keeping with either the anime or the manga it was based on as I made the character more eclectic and a bit less "anything for a good fight" sort of Saiyajin.

There was a solution to having a dozen people going as Superman - you simply went as one of the other versions: black & white TV series Superman, Elseworlds Red Son Superman, Superman as a villain aligned with General Zod, Superman as he might have been had the spaceship crashed in Australia and he'd been raised in that culture, and so on. With major series and a main character, it was a way of standing out in a crowd when you knew some people would be doing that same character.

Some didn't go that route. Robert Haynie, another attendee, had gone as Vegita from the same series and had become Vegita in the Event. He'd beaten the crap out of me during several spars, the first two he'd blamed me for being soft or trying to go easy on him. By the third time, he'd come to the realization that I wasn't kidding and that I was actually a blend of more than one character as well as Son Goku. So I'd incorporated bits and pieces of other characters and just specified that my version of the character was from a crossover story where Son Goku had learned planar travel and wandered through dimensions looking for new skills and challenges. Eventually getting recruited by an intraplanar organization that specialized in interventions. DIO, the Divine Intervention Office.

So I was, after the Xanadu Event, a Son Goku who had felt quite divorced from his previous life and had been living in a refurbished Old West ghost town with two versions of Ranma Saotome and a Prince Of All Saiyan. Hiding from those who would use us for nefarious purposes until things had settled down a bit. Just grocery shopping had people walking up to me and challenging me to a fight.

One of those not-strictly-Goku abilities I had was the occasional prophetic dream. One of which was about a group that had begun gathering up in Canada and how an international incident to reclaim a resource might be about to hit the fan.

Naturally, I wanted to at least drop a warning off.

Which had led to me dying of both having a hole blown through me and drowning in the dark at the bottom of one of the Great Lakes. I honestly had no idea which one would end up killing me, but did it really matter?

So, being as I'd already come to rest at the bottom of one of the Great Lakes, why had I had a sudden sensation of falling in all directions at once and then the feeling of smashing with great force into a very solid object? Why, being dead, did I hurt so much while lying on grass in the middle of a forest? Wasn't there supposed to be a great white light and the feeling of friends and family gathered nearby? Weren't my dogs who had passed on before me somewhere around? Wasn't there supposed to be the smell of roasting meat and the clatter of metal in the fields of Valhalla? Or the smell of sulfer and blood and pain? All depending on which afterlife I'd ended up with? Failing all that, the eternal dark and silence of nonexistence?

No. I still hurt extremely much and was unable to move from my position of lying here on a forest floor. There was even a rock digging into my shoulder.

Maybe I could just sleep a bit and it'd all resolve itself?

Actually, that sounded like a fine idea.

\-- --

When I woke, I was beyond merely hungry and perhaps even beyond ravenous.

I was also being attacked. Some sort of large bear-sized lizard creature.

I punched it as it bit me. I punched it again after the first strike had killed the beastie for good measure because I was severely irritated. Then I set a fire and ripped off one of the forelegs to roast it up, though the wait while that hungry was nearly intolerable.

If you're hungry enough, things taste delicious that wouldn't taste nearly that well if you didn't have those need-to-eat-NOW signals going off. Even though I was mostly coasting by without thinking things through in my current state, I knew that much.

When half the bear-lizard (lizard-bear?) was distending my belly, it became easier to think about something besides how hungry I was.

I was still a mess, but I seemed to be regenerating a bit. Son Goku's zentai factor maybe? The Saiyan, or Saiyajin in the original Japanese, species had this bit where that which did not kill you really did make you stronger. My speculation, based on watching a fair amount of Dragonball and the sequel Dragonball Z, was that it was an adaptive genetic factor that allowed for a metamorphosis that didn't impact appearance that much. If a Saiyajin was bitten by a radioactive spider, there was a chance that the Saiyajin would get some serious radiation sickness but end up with spider powers. A Saiyajin who was hit by telepathic attacks regularly would develop mental shields or their own telepathic abilities. The species themselves didn't have much in the way of imagination or anything approaching science nerds, so they never branched out beyond being martial arts fight enthusiasts.

All of this was going through my head as I finally began looking around me. Low-lying bushes and ferns were what I had used for starting a fire. When you can crush rocks with your hands, striking the two rocks together to spark things was just a matter of figuring out the angle and force needed.

I'd mainly been concerned with getting food into me. Fortunately, a Saiyajin has no digestive intolerances.

[Recovering Data.]

That stopped me. Words appearing briefly in a letterbox in the upper right corner of my vision? Not canon Son Goku, but as a member of DIO? Yeah. Hephaestus, one of the Greek pantheon who liked tech, loved video games and RPGs. So he had done up a User Interface for DIO's interdimensional agents that operated much like a RPG.

[Update Applied.]

That was promising and worrying at the same time.

[Status]

[Character: Son Grey, Identity/Rank: DIO Specialist, Class II]

"That's it?" I asked aloud, feeling pretty disappointed. Honestly, getting answers was pretty much up there with survival.

I flew straight up, feeling a little bit wobbly still. Then looked around from the vantage point of a few dozen meters. Air seemed thicker and off somehow - so alien world? Other dimension? This was definitely NOT the Great Lakes region as the plants and occasional animal I could spot were not what I expected to...

I spotted one in the shallows of a broad river and came to one of those stops where you're pretty sure a brain scan would show flatlines across the screen. All because I recognized what I was looking at.

A freaking Dimetrodon. A synapsid. The colors were off and the sail on its back was actually patterned like something off of a Peter Max palette.

Either I was in some variant Jurassic Park where things predating the dinosaurs were roaming, or I was way way way in the past. As in 295 million years in the past.

This was very very not good.


	3. Devonian Park?

I was not sure WHEN I was, as the sail-backed not-a-dinosaur was apparently not very common and that left a good chunk of the Permian Period where the species was in the process of gradual extinction. I was not sure WHERE I was as it wasn't like I could cast a GPS spell and the continents were subject to change over that kind of timescale anyway. I did spend a fair amount of time trying to figure those out though because I didn't have a means of dimensional transport just lying about to use.

Even if I used Goku's "instant transport" I had to have a pretty good idea of where I was going and where I was in relation to that.

Magic had different definitions in different worlds. So did "science" in some universes. In some universes one existed and was called the other or the two were just different sides of the same thing.

This was not a no-science world. If you performed an experiment with everything being exactly the same it would give exactly the same results. There wasn't much in the way of spirit-magic that I could find, and my clerical spells were all extra-dimensional in nature.

In universes where both operated, there was often a saying that science was a science and magic was an art. Or that magic was anything the other guy didn't know how to do.

If magic operated in a particular universe, that was because there was a field of energy that could be tapped into if various conditions were addressed and followed. This was basically "pure" energy - neither heat nor light nor some other form that actually interacted with the rest of the universe on its own. When the various conditions were met - that energy could be shifted into another form of energy (such as heat or light) or to accomplish various tasks. In some universes, this was what they called "dark energy" and in some universes that term was just "vaccuum energy" or the equivelant of a zero value space in a computer picture.

In my first year, I developed the basics of three styles of arcane magic while trying to figure out what would work and what would not. I didn't develop them very far, but that sort of thing is very time-consuming.

The first was basically the "D&D" style of "Vancian" magic. Study a spell, in this case from notes scrawled into my tunnel, to load it thread-by-thread into your mind. Cast the spell and the patterns were gone until you studied the patterns again to build it in your mind again. Like having a one-shot pistol for each memorized spell and the study/rebuild was reloading that pistol. As I was a D&D-style clerical spellcaster, that was a natural second avenue of approach for me. Though I was very low level in my original universe despite Xanadu, that seemed less the case now for some reason.

The second was a Channel style. Unlike Vancian, where the pattern and energies were internal and then released through triggers - this was taking energy from without and combining it with one's own will and internal magic. The problem was that it was missing something. It would probably take some kind of focus to master it properly. Focus-based magic wasn't uncommon among magic worlds - gems or wands or amulets or athames or mechanisms just required a lot of set-up and then the actual spell required mixing internal and external energies. Or something along that line.

Third was infusion or enchantment. Taking magical energy from that vast reservoir, combining it with precise will and focus and putting it into something in a specific pattern.

Clerical magic (extradimensional tap granted by pan-dimensional beings) allowed me to do things like shaping rocks into bowls and water containers and put in somewhere to sit down. Lots of use for a Stone Shape spell when you didn't have a lot of other equipment.

Leaving this universe for another was a major undertaking. The simplest method seemed to be creating an archway and then putting enough magical energy into it that one could link it to another location. Runegate, Moongate, Faerie Circle, Cenotaph Road, Stepping Stone - basic mechanism was the same through different applications.

If I could just up and leave - it would solve a lot of my immediate problems. Planar Shift was just such a spell, unfortunately I was having trouble accessing it.

Daily activities included finding food, though often food would find me as apparently I smelled of helpless small furry thing. Some creatures were avoiding me though, proving Darwin's natural selection of survivors was working even in the Devonian period.

Food and water, shelter being built a bit more every day, and work on magic. I wasn't worried about some future archaeologist running across a 675 million year old shelter because I was only using the one and this was far enough back that anything I built was unlikely to survive. If my spotty memories were correct, an awful lot of the current surface continent would be either subducted into the mantle or underwater long before there were archaeologists to run across such things.

My clothes didn't survive the first year. Which would have been a problem if there was anyone else to see me. Not that I wasn't fit and in shape, I might be a third-rate Son Goku but that wasn't exactly unfit, but I wasn't really that comfortable about being naked for extended periods. When I figured out the Mending spell I used it on my clothing but didn't wear the stuff as there were limits on how much the fabric could be patched together without new material.

Doing things in the buff was strange and some serious sunburn resulted for the first few days until I got the habit down of sticking to shadows and only straying out when scouting an area or involved in a fight. In the Devonian there weren't a whole lot of things that were going to be a serious challenge.

Now if I'd come here as a regular Joe human that would have been a very different story. Most likely dead in the first day as a mosquito the size of a vulture had somehow made it past the Carboniferous only for me to backhand it into a rock. If I'd been here without weapons or superhuman capabilities - that would have been a problem. Not to mention the various large lizard-things and giant roaches and some sort of mobile slime-mold that freaked me out quite a bit until a ki blast blew it up.

It wasn't until the end of the first year that a very welcome message appeared in that User Interface.

[Rebuild of Base Interface Complete]  
[Updates Applied: 11/20]  
[Current Job: Cleric. Domain: Forge. Level:17]  
[Current Race: 1/2 Saiyajin, 1/4 Hume, 1/4 Celestial]  
[Available Jobs: Requires Additional Repairs]

[Job System Not Available]

Well, that wasn't that helpful actually. Eleven of twenty updates? After a year here and all that time in my original timeline after the transformation? This was even worse than Century Link download speeds.

[Error: Character File Corruption Detected.]

Okay, that was bad.

[Correcting.]

"Oh hell," I said even though there was nobody around to hear it.

[Race/Class Incompatible.]  
[Correcting.]

"That doesn't sound good at all," I said. "Interrupt. Stop. Cancel. Pause!"

[Race corrected to Aasimar.]

"Reverse. Undo! Take Back?"

[Applying changes.]

I stopped hovering in mid-air as several things happened, none of which I was really happy with at the moment.

The most pressing being that as I was no longer a third-rate Son Goku clone - I was falling.

"Flight! Featherfall! Levitate! Arresto Momentum!"

To my considerable surprise, it actually felt like that last one produced a momentary hiccup in the whole dropping-like-a-rock thing.

The fall, as they say, wasn't so bad. Hitting the ground was the painful part.

I hadn't been too far up, it being a windy day. High enough that all the damn little bugs weren't swarming me. The Devonian Era mostly didn't have the giant insects of the Carboniferous Era, but they were still horrid little bugs.

I groaned and immediately cast "Cure Wounds" at 5th level. Then waited for the bones to finish fitting themselves back into place and melding together.

"Status?" I asked.

[Name: Son Grayku. Occupation: Divine Intervention Office, Operative Class IV.]  
[Class: Cleric. Level: 17. Domain: Forge.]  
[hp: 57/105]  
[Inventory System Unavailable]

"Of course it would be," I grumbled. "Time for repairs?"

[Temporary Inventory System Available Now.]  
[Full Inventory System Available: 10 years, 13 days, 16 hours.]

"Lovely," I said with as much sarcasm I could invoke. I noticed movement to the side and acted by reflex. "Wall of Fire!"

The weird mobile slime mold shrank back from the flames.

I picked up a stick and tried another cleric spell that Forge clerics had available. "Searing Smite."

It came around the wall, I hit it with my improvised club. It smouldered but then burst into flames.

Once that was done I could make my way slowly (by foot) to my cave complex. Fabricate would help enormously, but that didn't change that as an aasimar my lifespan was going to be considerably shorter than 675 million years.

That said, access to clerical spells was going to make it considerably easier than it would be if I had ended up as a rogue or something similar. Create Food & Water, spells to limit or neutralize poisons, access through Forge Domain to spells like Fabricate, were in addition to the basic healing spells the class was more known for.

What clerical spells lacked was major damage dealers such as a sorcerer or wizard might have. The toughness and strength of a Saiyan would have been a major step down if I'd ended up as a fighter-type but it was considerably less for a cleric or white mage sort.

The User Interface that Hephaestus had created for Divine Intervention OperativeS was based on old RPGs. As such, there were a number of advantages and disadvantages to it. One disadvantage was that it limited some of your options. In the case of a Forge Domain cleric - that included weapons and armor restrictions. Much as I might want to build and use a bow and arrow - I literally could not hit the broad side of a barn with such a weapon.

Instead one of the projects I came up with was forging the first weapon using my clerical abilities. Wood from the not-quite-trees was pulpy and not particularly strong. Stone could be shaped by magic but it had a tendency to form stress-lines and fractures with use.

That left metal, which required finding the ore and refining it. Copper to tin in a two-to-one ratio to provide a crude bronze in which two weaker metals combined to something stronger. Magic made this process a lot easier and ended up with much better results than my own crude efforts would have managed.

The first weapon of this world was therefore something I could use despite the restrictions. A bronze knife with a six inch blade that I was able to imbue with rudimentry magic, mainly testing how to do such things as I went. It was crude and not particularly attractive. Still with a basic enchant to keep the edge, it lasted a good six months before breaking under use. By then I had a better idea of what and how to go about improving things.

My second weapon incorporated the melted remains of the knife and was also of bronze. The spear was enchanted to take in magical energies slowly to strengthen itself so that it would not run out of magic the way the knife had. The spear was bronze with gripping areas padded by cured hide. It had a crosspiece to keep particularly aggressive beasts away from my largely unprotected body. The spearhead itself was as sharp as I could get it, and then enchanted to preserve that aspect so that I didn't have to flake away parts to sharpen it when it dulled.

I ended up naming the spear "Fred" after the Flintstones because it seemed vaguely humorous at the time.

So the first truly magical weapon in this world was a spear named Fred. That I ended up talking to a lot because the various beasties of this time-period were of an intelligence level that a mouse would literally be a genius among them.

"Identify," I cast after seven months of using the spear because I was getting an odd feeling off it.

[Fred. Spear +1/+3 vs Reptiles. Bronze and leather construction. Edge-sharpening, reinforced, lightning/air element, returning.]

The Domain of a cleric is basically the focus of their worship for a god or pantheon or aspect-of-reality. The philosophies they espoused and worked specifically with. Forge was creation, building, engineering, the hands-on end of science and technology, the practical nuts-and-bolts kind of thing even if magic was involved. Hephaestus, Saint Vidicon of Cathode, Gond, and so on were all concerned with that sort of thing.

So - as I had been raised Presbyterian, and despite having met and gotten along with a number of gods remained of something resembling that faith, as a cleric I was aware that being concerned with creation and building meant I was particularly biased towards that aspect of existence. That the spear I had made was now more powerful and more permanent than was originally intended was not a complete surprise. Lightning/air element was not expected, but kind of fit the weapon type.

Spears were among the first weapons created, being basically a dagger mounted on a staff or club. I'd used a club and made a knife, but both had basically been tools. Fred was the First Weapon, specifically something for hunting but that also could be used for war in case it turned out this was one of those timelines with sentient dinosaurian (or pre-pre-dinosaurian) lifeforms around.

Which, I realized, was an odd idea if you hadn't been familiar with some very odd timelines. Which threw me back into trying to piece together my own odd timeline. I was a normal frustrated human from a normal frustrating timeline where magic and superscience were fictional plot devices up until the Xanadu Event at which point it became more like the weird sort of setup you had in comic books dealing with superheroes. Backstories had developed into a pseudo-reality where they were real for the individual even if the rest of the universe said that those events hadn't happened.

So I was remembering a weird mixup of the way things really were, plus a sort-of Son Goku's backstory fighting Piccolo and Red Ribbon and so on, plus the life of a pan-dimensional operative of the Divine Intervention Office. It was very confusing and so I kept focusing on the here-and-now rather than deal with that mess.

In the Son Grayku memories there was a whole multiverse of alternate timelines that might not actually exist. Or they did and were different. It was backstory made for entertainment/cosplay given some semblence of reality.

In that weird pseudo-reality, there were universes where something had developed sentience long before humans. Silurians, if this was a Doctor Who timeline, were still well over a hundred million years away. Then there were the Cthulhu mythos beings which I was absolutely NOT ready to face. If those were around, I had absolutely no chance against them but I hadn't seen any indication they were around. Of course, if I could recall through all the conflicting and patchwork memories - they would have been around in the Pre-Cambrian or Cambrian Era and so in the now-distant past.

The discovery that the spear was on its way to improving itself made me reconsider the armor I had been making. If this was going to be a problem, I certainly wasn't going to leave a dozen or so artifacts behind that could alter the history of this planet significantly.

The armor I'd started putting together required stages to complete. First I had to identify (divination spells for that part as I was not a Geology major) the proper types of ore. Then I had to use Fabricate or other spells to refine those ores into the metal. Finally I had to use Forge Ritual magic to take the raw metal and shape it appropriately.

Repeat each stage for each piece.

Prep for enchantment could be done with each piece, but the actual enchanting process had to wait until it was completed. By then I had an idea of how to proceed with that.

I also, unfortunately, managed to channel and bind magical energy and ended up creating an Entity. Well, at least it was someone to talk to.

Originally I was trying to make a basin of water that would always remain pure. Such a thing would be handy for a number of projects as well as providing the necessity of fresh water. It eventually became a fountain that would produce water that would continually fill the basin in question. So far, no problem, right? Except the magic ran away with it and I ended up with a little roughly humanoid shape who looked up at me and asked if I was its father. Which I realized actually was about right.

I was quite aware that in magical terms - a name could actually define that which was named. This required me thinking long about it before I decided on a name for the magical child. Also unfortunately, a random comment as I was thinking about something else ended up with a name I did NOT intend getting applied. Which was how the first powerful nature spirit of this Earth ended up with the name Purity.

Purity grew up as a vaguely humanoid shape, but became more human-looking (though still made entirely of purified water) as it grew up. While watching animals, it decided upon gender but would change its mind several times sometimes over the course of a single day. Which is an entirely faerie thing to do, if you think about it.

I wasn't idle during those years.

[Added Wizard Class.]

[Wand-Based Magic. Journeyman Level.]

[Vancian Magic. Beginner Level.]

[Enchanter Skills Added.]

[Job System Running. Updating.]

This was ridiculously slow update speeds.

Still, it was something more to work with.

"Why is the river flooding AGAIN?" I asked aloud, but then my eyes flicked to Purity. Who had been steadily growing in power. Who was a WATER elemental. At present, in this universe, Purity was THE water elemental.

"Right," I said, not wanting to see the connection but reluctantly making that connection. "Need three more then." Imbuing even one would take a lot out of me - Purity certainly had. So, with rests in between, and with all the other projects going on - another six months or so was going to be accounted for.

Actually, as it turned out, it was closer to a year-and-a-half.

***

Author note: wrote this much just curious where i could go with this setup. Might go back and erase the Devonian stuff and set it in either DC or Marvel timelines instead. What do you think?


End file.
